American Express Company (AXP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hey, everybody. Thanks again for joining us. So up next, we have the bon ton CFO of another bon ton company American Express, Christophe Le Caillec. Welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely.

So let's dive right in, if you don't mind. So there was a lot of chatter preceding your fourth quarter earnings anticipating that maybe the top end of your revenue growth range in '25 may not have a double-digit handle on it. Of course, not only did you put out a guide for 8% to 10% revenue growth for this year, but Q4 spend reaccelerated. And you also noted during the call that January spend had been tracking at that time in line with the Q4 trend. And if this is sustained, it'll be at the top end of that 8% to 10% range. The question number one, you did note in the earnings call that '25 will be a billing story. Do you think that the year for the Amex customer is shaping up to be a high single-digit billings growth this year, which Steve noted at the December conference would be needed to hit that 10% aspirational level of revenue growth?

So it's too early to tell, I think. We were positively pleased with the Q4 performance. You remember, billing was up 8%. And we saw an uptick across consumer, small business, large corporations. And we spent a lot of time unpacking this, and we saw an uptick across income band in the consumer space, across various industries, as well in the small business and base. So we're really pleased with that. Too early to say what it means for the balance of the year for now. We're monitoring the trend. It seems like there is a bit more optimism, but it's really too early to say.

Does that [indiscernible] travel and discretionary, or significant contributors to acceleration in the fourth quarter, particularly airline spend, in your experience, how sustainable is travel spend at that level, assuming that '25 is a good year for the economy in the U.S. consumer?

Yes. So, travel and entertainment is a very interesting category, not only because it's our heritage, but because it is the ultimate discretionary category, right? People choose to go to the restaurant or not, or eat at home, they choose to travel. And there was a lot of strength in the T&E spend. We saw a big uptick in airline spend, especially front end of the cabin, which was up 19%, very strong year-over-year performance. So it means that our customer base feels optimistic and has confidence in the future. We also saw the small business optimism index tick up a little bit. So these are good signs. But similar to goods and services, it's a bit too early to tell which way it's going to go, but we'll take it a quarter at a time, and it feels good to see those kinds of numbers.

Great. So you've seen investor expectations reset following your earnings print. Is there anything about investor expectations that surprised you? And what's the Street missing that you think we ought to be spending more time understanding?

Just like you, I spend a lot of time with investors. And I think, by and large, they get the story of American Express. I think I talk to many of them and read, I think, pretty much all the analyst reports, and I think everybody is aligned on our full year guidance, 8% to 10% revenue growth and EPS between 15 and 15.50. So I think we're at a good space there. When I kind of narrow it down a little bit to Q1, I think Q1's expectations are too high. When we analyze the sequential here -- sequentials between Q4 and Q1, the expectation from investors and analysts is that this would be pretty flat. And it cannot be flat. I mean there are at least 2 reasons why Q1 should be sequentially down from Q4. One is we have 1 less day, right? Last year was a Leap Year. So for us, that translates into about 1 percentage point of growth. And the second thing is, which we talked a little bit about at -- during the call, FX is a drag for us. I mean the strength of the U.S. dollar is a headwind to our growth. And the dollar is a bit stronger now than it was in late December. So when you add up those 2 items, sequentially, the revenue growth should be either lower than what we had in Q4, and EPS should adjust as well accordingly. But let me be clear, right? We're very confident and very comfortable with the full year guidance that we gave. It's just the Q1 that I think is a little bit disconnected from what we see in the macro trends.

Got it. Well, thank you for that update. I'm sure people appreciate that. Pulling back up, net interest income has contributed nicely as consumer balances normalized. How should we think about Card Member loans and receivables growth in '25, especially as many investors think revolve growth is peaking. You did speak of the lending opportunity at Investor Day. Maybe remind us where you think American Express can penetrate the lend wallet more deeply?

So let's step back a little bit here first, right? And why we are in the lending business because that's not intuitive to all investors. We are in the lending business because that is what our customers want. They revolve. And they have always had revolving balances. They used to have those revolving balances with our competitors. And so we thought it was right to develop solutions for our premium Card Members so that they can actually revolve a bit. And what we've done, which has been very successful and, by far, the biggest contributor in terms of balance growth has been coming from the feature that we called Pay Over Time. which is a revolving capability that is attached to the charge card. So unique technology where we combine the no-preset spend limit where you can really spend a lot of money and we underwrite large amounts of money item by item, transaction by transaction. And at the same time, we give you the capacity to revolve a bit. That works really, really well, and the economics are very attractive because this lending is attached to premium card members, and therefore, it's typically short-term revolving. It's very low credit risk and it's a very attractive business. And typically, we underpenetrate the revolving needs of our Card Members. We tend to capture a big share of this spend wallet, but a much smaller share of their lend wallet. And therefore, the opportunity for us to grow is actually very high. And I want to reemphasize the point about a lending model that is attached to a premium customer base because these economics are very different from just like revolving that you see on the classic credit cards, right? And it's tested as well by the Fed when they did the CCAR stress test, American Express is by far the best performer, because the portfolio is resilient under stress as well. So it's a very attractive business for us. And a normal evolution of what we're doing because, as I said, that's what our Card Members need from us.

So maybe I wanted to dive into the other side of the balance sheet, the quarter, you also highlighted how your high-yield savings account balances grew 17% in 2024, and your funding mix continues to shift towards a more deposit-heavy mix. You also have some newer initiatives like small business checking and rewards checking. Can you talk about the uptake across your deposit products and the potential tailwinds that you see there over time?

So it's a long game that we're playing here. We started taking deposits right after the Great Financial Crisis. I think the first time we offered this product was back in 2009. Now it's 60% of our funding mix. And it's accretive in terms of revenue. It supports NII. It's accretive in terms of the spread, like margin, and it supports, therefore, the strong ROE. So it's a very -- it's a net good thing for us. So as you pointed out, I think in Q4, the balance growth in deposits was up 17%. So very strong performance. These products and value proposition was also tested during the SVB crisis, and we were a net beneficiary of this deposit. So the customers are confident that if they put the savings with us, we're going to give it back to them when they need it. And so it's a very interesting piece of the business. To your point, we are expanding in the consumer checking and small business checking accounts as well, because we think that that's what the card members want, right? And we have unique value proposition and rewards that are attached to the checking accounts, which makes us competitive in the marketplace, and will provide another source of fund at a lower level as well in the future. Very pleased with the start of this value propositions. It's still small in the scheme of things. But just like the high-yield savings account was very small 15 years ago, it's going to grow and I'm sure it's going to play a bigger role in our funding mix. And not only in the funding mix, right, also in the relationships that we develop with our card members and providing like a more complete set of financial products to meet their needs.

So let's talk about the young people, Millennials and Gen Z, continue to be a strong tailwind for American Express. And I think the spend in the fourth quarter for this cohort was more than twice that of Gen X and 4x that of the baby boomers. I think at Investor Day, you shared that there are about 75% of your new acquisitions in Gold and Platinum. What's the story for this cohort in '25? Is it that a continued acquisition or an acceleration of organic growth?

Yes. It's both. So you're right to point that out. This is a major breakthrough for American Express. 10 years ago, we would not talk about this cohort of customers as representing 70% of the Platinum and the Gold Card acquisition. So major breakthrough for us here in that space. Let me tell you a couple of things about this, how they behave. First, before I get into how different they are, let me tell you how similar they are. They're very similar in terms of credit profile, right? The average FICO of this cohort at acquisition is 750. So very strong credit profile. The second thing is that they value premiumness just as much as the older cohorts, right? And so we engage with them. They engage very much in the value proposition. They use the benefits probably even more so than the older cohorts. They give us a bigger share of their wallet than the other cohorts, probably because the older cohorts started with Amex when the coverage was not at parity. Now it is at parity. So we start a relationship with them from the get-go with a big share of their wallet. And what we've seen as well is that when we look at retention rates, so you look at over, say, a 2, 3-year period, where they had to make like 2 or 3x the renewal decisions, the retention rate of these younger cohorts is actually higher, it's stronger than what we see with the older cohorts. So when you put all of this together, you can see that, first, the value proposition resonates with that population. Second, they're engaging with the product. They're using the product. They like the benefits that we're putting in there. And their retention rate being so high, the lifetime value that they represent is super attractive. So what we're getting is a new, I would say, customer base, and with embedded revenue growth for the future. Now their spend and their revolve is a bit less than the older generation, but it's just a matter of time. And we've seen in the past, because we used to have young people as well in the past, we've seen that it takes time to build up all the way up to the maximum spend, which is probably in the 40s or 50s. It will take time to get there. But I like the embedded revenue growth that is included in these acquisitions today.

So wanted to follow up on that. You talked about a more engaged customer in your ecosystem. At the same time, there's no question that competition in the premium fee-paying space has always been fierce, so it feels like, as well as a consumer and an analyst, that it continues to get hotter. American Express has always been very front-footed at building the ecosystem of value proposition. Another example, you acquired Tock, a restaurant reservation platform. As you think about future investments and partnerships, what value propositions have you learned premium consumers engage with the most? And is there a difference between this growing new cohort that has 20 years of lifetime value in front of it versus some of your longer-standing members?

So this is definitely a space we know a lot about, and we have a lot of colleagues at American Express spending time trying to figure this out. The way I think we can talk about it that would be useful to you as we think about competition -- there's always been competition, especially for that segment. And interestingly, this is where we do the best, right? And there is probably like 3 levels of engagement with that premium customer base. There is one which I would call table stake. This is like the benefits, like the rationale value where you get the credit here, you get a discount there. Here there's a lot of competition. It's easy to compete on those, I would say. There's always someone who can actually match your offer. We actually go north of that. So that doesn't make a difference. What makes the difference is the experiential level of competition and the emotional engagement we get from our card members. By experiential, I'm thinking about, for instance, lounge access, those Centurion lounges that we have, we have over 30 Centurion lounges. The next best competitor, I think, is less than 10. And it's not something you can replace overnight. We have partnership that gives access to our card members as well that it's not easy to replicate at scale. And the third layer, which is probably the most important one, is what we call internally the emotional relationship that we have with our card members. This is where, if you lose your card, you lose your -- say, your passport in a foreign country, who do you call? You call American Express, and we'll sort it out for you. Every year there is this meeting at American Express with the colleagues who actually observe over and beyond those card members, it's super insightful. And you hear stories that either makes you cry about people who have like -- involve in car crashes, in Bali, and we have to fly over to Singapore for emergency. We do those things, right? And we do those at scale much better than anyone else. And how many card members benefit from those super, super higher-touch services? Probably not that many. Although when you stick to American Express with your product for 40 years, the odds that one day you can be involved in a situation like this are real. But what's important is that customers know that we're going to have their back. They know that, even if they don't need that, they have a phone number, they can call us, we'll pick up the phone, and we'll say what can we do to help you. And that emotional connection that we have with our customers, our card members, is something that none of our competitors have been able to replicate, and definitely not at scale and over a long period of time. So we feel that this is the space where we are the best -- where we are at our best. And I think that that's what makes the difference. Everybody talks about the credit you get here on this ride over this airline, at the end of the day, when you are a premium card members, when you are affluent, that's not what makes the difference, right? What makes the difference is to know that the card -- I mean, American Express will have your back. And that's what you pay for when you sign up for Platinum or Centurion Card.

And even below the airlift in Bali, I remember when Eleven Madison Park had a pop-up in The Hamptons, and they only took American Express, and literally had friends opening up accounts because they couldn't be -- the others -- the jargon of it is FOMO. You're going to get left out or you're not eating at EMV over the summer. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Your international card momentum has also been a very strong part of the story. Can you unpack the efforts on the international side? What's been driving the billings and receivables growth here?

So lots of growth in international, has been the case for many years. I think the reason for that is because we start from a low base in terms of penetration. We typically have about 6% of spend penetration in those countries. And so our ability to grow is much higher. Overseas, we talked about how premium the portfolio is. But outside of the U.S., the positioning of the brand is even more premium. And so you have higher card fees, you have less revolve, you have more cross-border spend, more cross-currency spend. So it's a very premium portfolio with very low credit risk. And it's growing very fast because we're growing the coverage, we're growing the customer base. And we've been investing in this business for decades, right? And it's a really interesting part of the business because we have to grow the merchant coverage at the same time as grow the portfolio of card members, and all of that at the same time and in the premium space. So a lot more growth to come because when you start from that 6%, you just -- there's a lot more opportunities. And we're making strong progress. Fastest-growing part of American Express. It's one of the most exciting. That's where I spent most of my career as well. I absolutely love it. And it's a very, very interesting part of our business, I would say.

So sticking to International, you have talked about continued runway to increase coverage outside of the United States. That said, there are geographies like Europe, where perhaps there's a bit more reticence for merchants to pay higher discount rates. How do you think about optimal parity coverage or optimal coverage internationally versus how you've thought about it and approached in the U.S.?

Yes. So first of all, 7, 8 years ago, we reached parity coverage in the United States in 2019 right before COVID. And we never really had time to celebrate it, and maybe that was a little bit missed by many of our investors. The way we reach parity coverage in the U.S. is through partnerships with payment facilitators, with third-party acquirers. And the challenge for us was actually this very long tail of very small merchants, very dynamic, and it was hard for us to close that gap, and we did it through partnerships. That's what we're doing as well outside of the U.S. and in Europe. So I'm optimistic that we're going to get to the same outcome. How long is it going to take? I don't know. But we're making steady progress. In the top 12 markets, we have spend coverage of about 80%. And we're working, just like I said, with those payment facilitators and aggregators to actually get to the 20%. And it's 80%, but if you -- it's very concentrated in the places where our card members are, where they travel to. So it probably feels a bit better than 80%. But it's up from 72% a year ago. So it's progressing. We're going to get there. It's going to take time. And as I said before, it's really the challenge of building the customer base at the same time as the merchant base. Because when we speak to merchants, "Why don't you take American Express?" You might be surprised. But they don't mention price as the first reason. Typically, the first reason why they do not take American Express is because they don't see enough card members, especially those small businesses. They want more business, more clients and they want access to our base. So the trick for us is to do this chicken-and-egg thing, right, which is to grow the Card Member base, and to grow coverage, to do it at the same time. And I'm optimistic that we'll get to a situation similar as the one we have in the U.S. in a few years from now.

That's a great explanation on how you tackle the tail actually. Talk a little bit more about the small business at American Express. On one hand, we've heard a lot about animal spirits that could translate into business activity. And while spend did accelerate here in the fourth quarter, you noted there was still significant runway to improve. How is the environment in '25 shaping up for that small business spend?

Yes. It's really hard to say. I agree with the animal spirits, and the Q4 spend numbers were interesting. They went up sequentially 200 basis points. And we looked at this, as I said, it's across multiple industries or the small businesses. And bear in mind that we have a market spend share of that about 47%. So it's -- you're a big player in that space. And we saw that lift across like all the industries. So optimistic about what it means. The small business index was up as well in Q4. But it's too early to call it an inflection point and now we're just back to very strong growth that we experienced a few years ago. It's too early to say. We're monitoring this very closely. But at this stage, I'm not going to go beyond that.

So speaking of your spend share in small business, that's something that fintechs are trying to peck away at, so, actively. Tell us a little bit about how your technology value proposition to small businesses are holding up relative to this fintech competition? And do you think your spend share here can be sustained or even expand over the next few years?

So I'll go for the latter on this one. The way to think about technology, and let's spend a bit of time on this, because it's probably something that is not well understood how strong our technology is and how focused we are on technology. Specifically, when it comes to small businesses, I think it's worth splitting the technology, if you want, between the front end and the back end. Call the back end, the core card payment, lending infrastructure. This is where the no-preset spend limit is a huge advantage. And it's a technology that really no one has really been able to match at least at scale. That includes as well dispute, fraud. Like our fraud performance is like 3x better than the other networks. It's not like 50% or 30%. It's like 3x, right? So that's technology, that's decision science, that's models, that's data, that's smarts. And so the back end, we think that we have leading technology and we keep improving it. On the front end, what the fintech did was to improve specifically their expense management capabilities, if you want. And it's fair to say that our -- we have some gaps here. We're aware of it. We're working on it. And so we're going to close that gap and we'll -- our aspiration here is to combine the best core infrastructure that I just described, combined with expense management solutions that are going to be leading in the marketplace as well. That's where we're going to go.

Maybe switching gears for a little bit. As I spoke to investors on your results, I think part of the initial less positive reaction, despite the acceleration in spend and the Street sensitivity to your revenue outlook, was on expenses. And the concern boiled down to, given the competition in the premium space, are customer acquisition and retention costs rising relative to the relative lifetime value produced? How would you respond to this concern?

Yes. So expenses, when you look at it from 1 quarter to another, it's always -- there's always plenty of stories, right? I find it more useful and I think that's what a lot of our investors are doing, to look at it over a longer period of time. But just look at 12 months, right? Last year, we grew revenue 10%, FX adjusted. And we grew expenses, I think, 6%, right? So over the -- and that included dialing up marketing substantially. And so I think we're doing a good job at managing the expenses. And if you look at operating expenses where we spend a lot of our dollars there, it's an expense base of about $15 billion, we've been able over -- if you look at it, if you graph it over the last 10 years, we've been able to grow these expenses at a much slower pace than revenue. That creates operating leverage. And that transformed the scale, the growth, into profit. And when it comes to the variable customer engagement expenses, so that's rewards, cost of Card Member services and the likes, if you look at the last 5, 6 quarters, we've been in that 40%, 43% range, right, which means that we are able to maintain the margin while growing a very strong case, and we keep those operating expenses at a much lower growth rate than revenue. When you put all of these together, combined with either the best credit metrics in the industry, and that remains below pre-COVID, I mean that gives you the very strong EPS growth that we've seen and that we are projecting in the future. So I find that expense management is really the strength of American Express. If you know people working at American Express, I'm sure they're telling you that we're managing the ship very tightly. And we're just trying to be very smart about it. Just to give you another insight in terms of how we're thinking about expenses, these variable customer engagement expenses, there's always a debate in terms of whether you should embed that benefit or not and what's going to be the cost. But the way I think about it is that the way this pays back in terms of economic value is actually on the credit line. By having richer value proposition, by having more premium servicing, what we do is attract more premium card members that actually pay us back at the end of each month and don't default. So that's why the credit numbers are so good. So expense management is a complicated concept. We try to get it right at the product level, at the cohort level, by market, by geography, by everything. But all in all, I think we have the good balance. And I'm optimistic that it will remain an area of strength for us and a source of value creation for shareholders.

So Christophe, just on this topic, you did mention on the, call that, marketing spend will moderate for the company this year. What does that mean for you guys? And further, how fixed is your budget? And the reason I ask it this way is we have competition from someone like JPMorgan, they generate a massive amount of revenue in their other businesses and they're sitting on tons of excess capital, implying a war chest of marketing dollars. And of course, you have the Capital One Discover deal coming at the pipeline. If your best competitors amp up their marketing programs, how will you respond?

First, I would welcome that. And I heard as well that many of our competitors have a lot of, as you say, capital, but I understand that some shareholders are expecting to get some back as well, right? And so listen, we spent about $6 billion last year. The goal is not to spend $7 billion or $8 billion. The goal is to be smart about how we're spending this. And so there is tension, if you want, between the volume or the level of marketing spend that you know about and that you see in the P&L and the efficiency that we expect to generate from this marketing spend. As you know, the way we treat these marketing dollars, we call that an investment in American Express, and we subject those investments to a very rigorous and disciplined ROI calculation. We want a return on those dollars. So if the competition dives up, last time it did at scale when one of our fiercest competitors wanted to invest heavily in the premium space. We benefited from that. It expanded the market for premium products. And every time someone wants to buy a premium card, they always consider American Express. And some of them are just going to come to us. So I welcome that competition. And I think we're not going to enter into either like let's spend $7 billion this year or $8 billion afterwards. I want -- and I'm the CFO of this company, I want the discipline around the efficiencies to be maintained here and the innovation that we are generating in this space to translate into efficiencies. To give you an example, we spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, together with the technology and the data science organizations, to personalize those welcome offers. Most of the offers that we want to put on the market now are personalized, individualized. We want to find the exact point that will tip you over and make you react to an offer, not below, not too high, just the perfect offer. And we want to do that before actually hitting your credit bureau and you being impacted. So this is technology that we're developing that will generate efficiencies. So the goal is just not to increase the $6 billion to $7 billion. The goal is to make those dollars work harder and harder and harder.

I'm going to put a pin on that because I do want to ask a little bit more about data science. But going back to what you said about defaults and how that's part of the value proposition for shareholders in terms of your ROE, for your customer set, where are we in terms of credit normalization for this cycle? So credit trends continue to be below pre-COVID levels, portfolio continues to shift towards more premium customers, gap versus peers continue to widen. If '25 continues to be a strong economic year, how should we think about the path of delinquencies and losses?

So I'm glad you're pointing this out because this reflects not only the very strong and disciplined underwriting that we have, but more importantly, that the growth we generated over the last 2 or 3 years was genuinely in the premium space, and that these expensive value propositions that we put in the market are translating into attracting card members who have a very low credit risk, which translates into very low credit write-offs. So if you look at over the last either 3 years indeed, there was definitely some normalization going on post-COVID. I think that for this cohort, at least for our card member, by and large, most of the normalization is behind us. That game played out. There is probably a little bit still in terms of the revolve rate, but it's probably not that big. It's marginal. So I would say most of this has played out. Now in terms of what that means through the cycle and going forward, the first thing I need to say is that we do not target specific write-off rate. We're not saying, okay, we want to target a 2.2% write-off rate and reengineer, if you want, our underwriting rules to fit into this. Write-off is an outcome, it's not a target. What we do is we target premium card members, we're just going to underwrite every single transaction in card member that meet our profitability criteria. And write-off rate is going to be the outcome. That's why it's sometimes a little bit more complicated to predict. But the outcome of this is the result you just described, right? We are materially below where we were pre-COVID. We are a much bigger company. And the gap to peers, like most peers are above pre-COVID levels. So we're definitely increasing the gap. And I think that validates the stability of the portfolio, the strategy to grow in that space and all the decisions that we made around product, value proposition, distribution over the last 3, 4 years, and we're going to keep doing it.

And just to unpack what you mentioned about your data science team and optimizing offers, clearly, AI has been a general theme for everything. How is your company using AI now? And what do you think are the best use cases for American Express?

Yes. So if you think about how this would impact American Express, I think they're -- the technology is ubiquitous, right? It's going to be available to everybody. And so that's not what's going to make the difference. What's going to make the difference is the proprietary datasets that you have combined with some kind of commitment you have to transforming your business and incorporating this into your -- the way you operate the business. And we have those 3 things, right? We have the technology. We have amazing data, probably the best data that we've been accumulating for decades, especially with the card members that we have so long. And we have the commitment to the transforming and innovating. To give you an idea, we've been using AI in our underwriting model since 2010. I think we were the first financial institution to get the approval from the regulators to do that. And right now, 100% of our engineers who are coding, so those like -- only those who are coding, right, but it's about 8,500, 100% of them are equipped with Copilot, GitHub Copilot. If you look at the travel assistance, those people you call to get a trip, or if you've lost your passport, 100% of them, and we have about, I think, 5,000 of those, are also equipped with what we call Travel Assist, right, which allows to mine our database and prepare better trips and offer better services to the card members. And what we see is that it's delighting the card member, it's delighting the colleague. It speeds up the duration of the call and generating efficiencies. So it's big wins. So we are committed to pushing and introducing Gen AI into our business. And we're going to do it the way we always do things, right, building from the core, from our strength. Probably we don't do a great job at either explaining or issuing press releases the way some of our competitors do. But the difference is that it's clearly already implemented in many of the processes that we run.

And we do have time for one question that came through the iPad from the audience. It's really a broad question on the Trump deregulation agenda. Maybe talk about the competitive dynamics, if it changes at all? And maybe broad comments on what's been happening in Washington.

Oh, it's very hard to say. First, it depends on the day. Like each day we have a different answer. We'll be told what's happening there. We're not going to do anything proactively here. As we discussed this morning, we consider a relationship with the card members like 20, 30, 40 years. And therefore, we're playing that long game. And so exactly what's going to happen, it's hard to say. We'll see. What matters, which is probably for me the most important thing is less what it means to American Express and more what it means to the broader economy. If it strengthens the economy and the economy is growing, inflation is controlled, then it's going to translate into a lot of good things for American Express. And that's what matters more than exactly how it's going to impact us.

Got it. Christophe, I think it's a good way to end. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much. Thank you.